Broken Wings, Forevermore
by Fifth Horseman
Summary: She thought she new what strength was, that she was strong. She felt that strength justified all. Lie to your self long enough and you will convince yourself of anything, that everything you do is right. But down in Haven's vault Raven met a reckoning that she never counted on. The truth, the real truth hurt like nothing else ever could.


**Disclaimer:** RWBY belongs to Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth. I own nothing of it and am only playing in this wonderful world Monty gave us.

Back with another RWBY one shot, this time visiting Raven after she left Haven. After seeing what happened between her and Yang I couldn't resist writing this, it played right into my writing style.

Hopefully you'll enjoy it and let me know what you think.

 **Broken Wings, Forevermore**

Raven staggered into her tent, her vision obscured by the tears that refused to stop flowing from her crimson eyes. It was a good thing that she had put a temporary hold on relocating the camp until she was finished with her business at Haven because with the condition she was in right now she likely would have came here on autopilot rather than arriving at the new location. Most of everyone's possessions, including her own, were packed up and ready to go awaiting the final order to break camp and it was a box of her belongings that she promptly tripped over, causing her to hit the rough wooden floor next to her bed with a graceless thud.

She got to her hands and knees and no further, sniffling as she rubbed her left cheek where it had struck the floor. What a sight she was, the feared leader of a tribe of bandits on her hands and knees crying after a scared, shaking, one armed kid had shattered her without even laying a hand on her. Pathetic. Weak. A total fraud. If any of the tribe were to see her now it would be the end of her as their leader. The hell of it was she couldn't even be angry at Yang for the things that she had said because they were all true. Every single cutting word.

She got up and sat on her bed, planting her elbows on her knees and cradling her head in her hands. The entire operation at Haven had gone completely to shit. All of the people she expected to show up had done so and how predictable was it that Summer's daughter would try to plead and reason with her to be on their side of the fight. Such naive foolishness. Despite what she knew and felt about the girl's departed mother she hadn't felt the least bit of remorse for opening the portal and letting Cinder hit her with a fireball. If she was determined to play this game of fools then she could take the consequences that came with it.

And Qrow, the damned idiot. She knew that the moment he saw her there he knew what she was up to. Even so, he still couldn't even bring himself to seriously try and take her out when he took that first shot. He was too soft to do what was necessary. If the roles had been reversed she would not have hesitated to take and land a killing blow. As for the Fall Maiden, she fully expected her treachery, she wasn't blind or stupid and she knew Cinder had the same intent. What she hadn't expected was for the bitch to be sporting a Grimm arm. At least Vernal kept up the ruse once the fingers of that abomination were embedded in her guts and never let on that she wasn't the Spring Maiden.

She didn't underestimate Cinder and her skills, but she was confident from the start that she could defeat her. She only wished that she had absolute confirmation that the woman was actually dead and wasn't going to reappear at some inopportune moment in the future. Yang coming down to the vault wasn't expected but it also wasn't a total surprise either. She fully expected then that they would have words but she never could have imagined that the end result would be what it was.

She pressed her hands to her eyes, trying to stop the persistent flow of moisture but to no avail. She looked to the sparse collection of bottles at her bedside and almost snorted as she reached for a full bottle of Mistralian whisky, just imagining what her brother would say at seeing her reach for his preferred method of getting along with the world. Her daughter's words had cut her to the core and she needed something to pour into that wound. Taking the bottle she left the tent and took to the skies.

A few miles away on the edge of Mistral's largest lake, where the small transport craft that had brought the Schnee Princess to her doorstep had crashed, was the ideal spot for her stop and isolate herself for a while. They had stripped what little was useful from the wreck and the dead pilot got a shallow grave in the woods for his trouble. The pocketful of Lien he got from his passenger making a decent contribution to the tribe's funds. His ship was now an empty husk and that was pretty close to how she was feeling right about now.

She uncapped the bottle and took a swig, the liquor burning a path down her throat. What a miserable thing she had become, her life built on such a massive series of lies and self delusions that it was doubtful she'd even know truth anymore short of it bashing her over the head. Well, her own flesh and blood had supplied her with that and she could clearly see the ugly truths that she had always spent so much time and energy trying to deny. Taiyang had described her to Yang as troubled and complicated. Of course, she didn't see herself that way at the time but it was essentially the truth.

When she went to Beacon to train as a Huntress it was mostly so that she could better protect the tribe that had raised her and Qrow. They were pretty much the only ones with the tribe at that time that were capable of it and the strength she would gain by becoming a Huntress would allow her to protect and maybe even one day lead them. She firmly believed in the views the tribe held about strength. If you were going to live outside the kingdoms you had to be strong to survive and if others were unable to prevent you from taking what was theirs then they were weak and the weak died. The wilderness was not a place for the weak. Her new team mates at Beacon held far different beliefs, ones that she thought to be foolishly naive and hopelessly idealistic and unfortunately it seemed that her brother was inclined to agree with them.

She could never understand how Qrow could turn his back on those who raised them. He branded them thieves and murderers while she argued back that they did what they had to in order to survive. It rarely ever crossed her mind back then that forcibly taking what others had worked so hard to get and killing them if they dared to resist and then in their despair leaving them to the Grimm, was not a matter of strength but the height of weakness and cowardice.

Despite the clashing viewpoints Team STRQ was one of the best to come through Beacon. She tried her best to keep her distance and to dislike her team but she could never quite make that happen. She and Summer Rose were just about as opposite as they could get and yet she found that she simply could not hate the woman no matter how hard she tried. She hadn't liked it that Summer had been named team leader. She didn't like being led by someone she saw as weak and timid and meek and far too kind to be anything other than hopelessly naive and all too trusting.

In the manner of the tribe she was raised by she challenged Summer for the right to lead their team, the wishes and decision of Professor Ozpin be damned. Qrow and Taiyang were outraged and she expected the little Rose to simply wilt and bow out, turning the leadership role over to her. But the small girl in the white hooded cloak just smiled sadly at her and said _'If that's the way you feel then I guess I have no choice.'_

She fought the only way she knew how which was for keeps and with the intent to kill. Summer chose to mostly defend and attacked sporadically which infuriated her. She had seen her fight during initiation and their first few combat classes and she knew she was capable of more than that. Was she mocking her, thinking she was so much better and that she could end the fight any time she chose? Or was she a coward who wouldn't fight anything other than the soulless Grimm?

It didn't matter how hard she attacked or what she said to try and goad her Summer would not press for an advantage. Even so as she had done a couple of times during the fight she did manage to land a blow to knock her on her ass. It was at one of those points when Goodwitch finally arrived and demanded them to cease. She was going to defy the Professor and end it herself anyway as Summer simply stood over her, once again refusing to press her advantage. But when she looked up and saw the sad look in those silver eyes and the trickle of blood running down between them from a cut on her forehead, she found that she just couldn't. The sight of blood on her pale skin just looked so wrong to her somehow.

 _'Please Raven...isn't this enough?'_

She took another drink. Summer knew. She knew that she was preparing to strike a last decisive blow, one that may have even been fatal with as low as their respective Aura's were at that moment. She had even left herself wide open, her weapon held to the side where she would have no hope of using it to block. She gambled on there being an actual conscience still alive and well within her. In the end she relented and put down her weapon and it had nothing to do with Goodwitch blowing a gasket at them. She couldn't even really say why exactly. That fight was the last time she ever tried to strike a blow at Summer Rose in anger.

Given her reputation she was fully expecting the worst from Professor Goodwitch but Summer took the blame for the whole thing. She explained that it had been her idea to have an unsupervised match, breaking the Professor's rule of first year students not fighting without an instructor present until the staff had been able to fully gauge their abilities...and their sense of responsibility. She had been too stunned to speak up and put the blame rightly where it belonged. It seemed that even back then she wasn't capable of doing the _right_ thing and she realized that she never did either thank Summer or apologize to her.

In the end the whole team was punished with several days worth of detention. Tai and Qrow got nailed for not having sense enough to stop the fight and Summer had to write a rather lengthy essay on responsible leadership. It was this incident that led to the beginning of the 'troubled' side of her that Tai told Yang about. She still held her beliefs gained from her upbringing in the tribe, but over the course of the next four years she would find those beliefs at odds with the true nature of a Huntress and her relationship with her team.

Over that time she actually got pretty close with them but her increasingly troubled nature often caused issues among them. Mostly she was actually fighting with herself, trying to reconcile the teachings of her upbringing with the views of her team and the ethics and morality of the nature of a true Huntress. Somehow she had never been able to separate the notion of only the strong survive while the weak perish with the strong surviving through murdering and robbing the weak. It had been ingrained in her for all of her life and she never could understand how Qrow could think any differently having been raised by the same people. She could understand Tai and Summer seeing it differently, they hadn't lived outside the protection of the kingdom and they didn't have to do whatever was necessary to survive.

The true nature and role of a Huntsman and a Huntress was the exact opposite of everything she knew and had been taught with the tribe. A Huntress would be helping the people not taking from them and killing them when they resisted. If anything, a Huntress would confront and fight bandits like her and true enough the tribe had run into Huntsmen and Huntresses before on their raids. Often it meant the tribe getting a bloody nose and losing a few members and that was one of the reasons why she was training at Beacon. The tribe needed that same kind of strength and protection on its side if it was to survive.

But exposure to her teams way of thinking, to _them_ and the fondness she had for them put her in constant conflict with herself, made her start questioning the ways of the tribe. Maybe Summer and Tai and Qrow weren't as wrong as she thought they were. Maybe _she_ was looking at life the wrong way. For a time she began to lean in their direction. It was part of what allowed her to fall in love with Tai and have Yang, it was part of what led her to begin working with Ozpin against Salem. Her team, the people she cared about, they were strong and they were more than willing to fight against the greatest evil they would ever face.

But somewhere along the way she was hit full force by the scope of what they were facing. She couldn't really say if that fear surged within her because she had just brought a child into such an uncertain world or not. If so, then abandoning that child seemed to be a very strange reaction to have. The paranoia that seemed to be an ingrained part of life with the tribe began to take hold, making her see looming shadows and conspiracies everywhere she looked. Her mindset returned to what it had been before, causing irreparable rifts between her and the others. Finally one day she just left as if they meant nothing to her and at that moment they didn't.

From that day forward she built every moment of her life on denying the truth and justifying herself with lies. Every decision, no matter how heinous was justified by the notion that might made right, strength was everything, and there was no room for the weak. She would ensure the survival of the tribe, she would keep them from the threat posed by Salem. If the others wanted to be led around by the nose by Ozpin and go blindly off to their deaths then they were welcome to it. She would survive. Funny how she never gave much thought to the idea that if Salem won, _everyone_ was going to be screwed whether they fought against her or not.

When they found the Spring Maiden she saw it as a great opportunity to further ensure the survival of the tribe. With power like that on their side they would be virtually untouchable. Pity then that the girl that held those powers was so ill suited toward using them. Whoever the previous Maiden was had done the girl no favours by passing the power to her. She was weak and scared and definitely not a fighter and nothing that they tried could turn her into one. The stress was wrecking the girl and since she had run away once she was likely to do it again. She didn't need that headache so she put her out of her misery and took the power for herself. Yet another horrible and wrong decision that she had no trouble layering in lies to justify.

Despite her attempts to justify it the look in her daughter's eyes when she figured out what she had done cut her like a knife, more so now than it did even at that moment down in the vault. While she was proud of the strength she had seen in Yang she didn't like the fact that she seemed to be following the same path as Tai, Summer, and Qrow. Why couldn't she see that fighting against Salem was impossible? She had already lost an arm, was she trying to lose her life as well? Had she really asked questions and made up her own mind, or was she just blindly following her sister, that damned miniature Summer Rose?

Despite all of her bluster about telling Yang and the Schnee girl the truth about what they were getting themselves into, she hadn't really told them much of anything, just enough that they should have had serious doubts. All she had really done was vengefully drop all of it into her brother's lap to make him try and explain it to them. Obviously they had chosen to believe the truth instead of her lies and it was going to lead them right into the jaws of the beast.

She sank in upon herself as she took another pull on the bottle. Despite having spent so little time with her Yang had managed to figure her out completely. Every damn thing she said was true. She was a liar, a thief, a murder. She was a coward and she was weak. She used others to get what she wanted, manipulated them to justify her herself. She turned her back on people and ran away when things got difficult. She was a horrible person and she knew it but she had spent her whole life layering lie upon lie to justify every single decision she ever made and every action she ever took. How brave and strong did one have to be to prey upon the weak and the helpless? To prey upon people who had showed enough guts to try and make it on their own outside the kingdom. Who spent their sweat and blood building their settlements, growing their crops, plying their trades and raising their families. They just wanted to live in peace.

But she wouldn't let them. Because they couldn't defend themselves against the Grimm or even her rag tag band of criminals she decided that they should suffer and that all of their hard work should benefit her and the tribe. They left death and despair in their wake and what they didn't destroy the Grimm did soon after they fled. The roar of approaching Grimm was always their signal to leave. Strong enough to fight simple villagers but not strong enough to face the Grimm. Only she and Vernal had the skills to do that and why should they? So long as the Grimm satisfied themselves with the villagers there was no need to fight them unless they tried to follow.

Vernal, yet another life she had used and thrown away. She had been her right hand and looked up to her and had been glad to pose as the Spring Maiden to keep the secret, all the way down into Haven's vault even. Even when Cinder turned on her and attacked her she didn't reveal a thing and with her last breath fired the shots that distracted the woman long enough for her to put and end to her. Hopefully. She did appreciate the sacrifice but felt little else about her passing, at least until right now anyway.

Growling and rustling within the forest behind her told her that the Grimm had finally arrived, drawn to her despair. She took another drink before setting the bottle down and standing, turning to face them as she drew her sword. She saw a few Beowolves and a couple of Ursa entered the clearing and she could see many more glowing red eyes in the dark forest beyond. She grinned savagely.

"Come and get me you soulless bastards!" she challenged. "And I'll send you where you and your master all belong, straight to the pits of hell!"

She charged into the horde, blade flashing and eyes blazing. Agonized howls rent the air as heads and limbs were severed. Grimm were frozen solid or burned like torches. Lightning struck others filling the night air with the scent of ozone and scorched flesh. Fierce winds picked up loose stones, branches and scattered debris from the wreck and battered the soulless monsters. She fought on pure instinct and hatred. Hatred for Salem, for this life, hatred for herself and everything she had done. More Grimm kept coming and she cut them all down. The smell of ozone, burning flesh, spilled blood and entrails. The air was fogged with the black sooty smoke that marked the decaying of the dead monsters. On and on it went until they finally stopped coming, all of them in the region either dead or going elsewhere, just intelligent enough to realize that only sure death awaited them if they approached.

She returned to the top of the wreck, chest heaving as she caught her breath. Sheathing her sword she sat back down, taking the bottle in hand and noticing that the approaching dawn was just starting to change the hue of the night sky. How long had she been fighting? She looked back over her shoulder at the clearing and noticed that it was somewhat larger now with several trees uprooted and knocked back into the forest or laying on the ground in splintered, blackened and smouldering heaps. She turned back to the coming sunrise and began to laugh. It was a broken mirthless sound, devoid of any sense of joy or well being.

Soon, she began to cry. The hand holding the bottle pressed it tightly into her thigh while the other hand came up to cover her face. So this was where her fears and blind loyalty to the ways of the tribe had brought her. Alone, crying in the woods where the tribe wouldn't see how weak she truly was. Alone, with no one to give a damn about her because she had burned all of those bridges with her lies and false and useless pride. Alone and stripped bare down to her core with nothing but her regrets, her guilt, and a bottle of whisky to keep her company.

Yang was right, she wasn't strong and didn't even know what strength was. She was a parasite who preyed on others while hiding behind her mantra that the strong lived and the weak died. She used people at her convenience, putting them in harms way so she could do her thing behind the distraction they offered. She lied to justify her actions, lying mostly for her own benefit to convince herself and keep herself believing that everything she was doing was right. She was a coward who ran away from a fight she had willingly joined because she was afraid of what they faced, so afraid that she had convinced herself that if she left and stayed out of it that the enemy would leave her alone. That hadn't worked and even if she had never found the Spring Maiden she and the tribe would have still suffered whatever fate Salem had in store for the world anyway. Her fear made her ignore the most obvious truth of the whole matter and by doing so she had essentially committed herself to living on her knees beneath Salem's shadow rather than risk dying on her feet to defy it.

Being torn open to her core meant there were truths that she could no longer keep bottled up and hidden away where she couldn't see them and thus ignore them. Despite all of their arguments, despite all of the bitter words, and despite the shameful and unforgivable act of bargaining with the enemy to end his life, she loved her brother. She always had. They should have been fighting side by side but she had driven a wedge between them all because he wanted to fight for the good of the world rather than take from it as a thief and a murderer. As his sister she should have been there for him when the weight of the nature of his Semblance threatened to crush him. Maybe if she had he wouldn't be so solitary and wouldn't have turned so heavily to the bottle to ease his pain.

After their initial problems she had come to love Summer like a sister. She had been the heart and the soul of Team STRQ, keeping them together when her actions threatened to tear them apart. She was kind and forgiving and certainly had to be just to put up with her. She always wanted to help and always wanted the members of her team to be happy and did whatever she could to try and make that happen. She must have disappointed Summer so many times with the way she would try and brush her off and just generally be uncooperative and surly. She had seen more than a few hurt looks in those silver eyes that Summer thought she had hidden from notice so well.

Taiyang, even now she really did still love him. It hadn't mattered how many times or how violently she tried to reject his advances he just kept trying. Finally after his incessant asking and Summer trying to prod her on his behalf she finally relented and went on a date with him and much to her horror she had actually enjoyed herself. He was a little strange and a little off the wall but he really was a good man. Falling in love with him and marrying him had not been a mistake despite how much time she spent convincing herself of that after she left.

Even then however she still kept tabs on him and Yang from time to time. She had hurt him so badly by leaving and especially by leaving him with a newborn child. She saw what a mess he was and used that to further reinforce her argument that he was nothing but a weak fool. She chose to distance herself from the fact that _she_ had broken his heart and nearly destroyed him. Worst of all was that at the time it meant virtually nothing to her.

It wasn't much of a surprise to her when Summer stepped in to help and eventually filled the void she had created. She loved and cared for Yang as if she were her own and she mended the wounds she had inflicted upon Taiyang. It wasn't much of a surprise either when she had her own child and right from the very start it seemed that Yang adored her new little sister. They all seemed so happy but yet again she chose to see them as being weak or at the very least foolish for thinking they could be this happy little family while still facing the spectre that was Salem and thinking they could defeat it. They simply refused to see reality, and that was really freaking rich coming from her.

When she heard that Summer had gone missing and was presumed dead she had to take some time to reign herself in. Of course, she thought the woman an idealistic fool who paid the price for being a part of Ozpin's crusade. She knew Summer had been taking missions from Beacon's Headmaster just as her brother had been and it had come to what she saw as the inevitable conclusion. She had to restrain herself from paying the man an angry and self righteous visit and instead went to Patch where she saw that Taiyang was probably in even worse shape than when she had left him.

She hadn't been spending as much time checking in and observing the family as she once did but started doing so again. She didn't know why she had ever been doing it in the first place, it had never been her intention to do it regularly. She had left and that should have been that but she kept finding herself going there and observing what was going on. Tai was a mess and barely able to function. Qrow tried to help out where he could but he wasn't able to be around all the time and with his Semblance he was probably already blaming himself at some level for the state of things as it was. To her surprise, six year old Yang started trying to look after Summer's daughter like she had taken over the role of mother. Even after Tai was finally able to pull himself together and start acting like a parent again, Yang continued to act as big sister, best friend, and surrogate mother to Ruby.

Despite not being any kind of a mother to her and having no hand in raising her or helping to shape her into the person she became, she was proud of Yang. She had done what she needed to in looking after her sister. She was talented and trained hard to work toward becoming a Huntress, even getting involved in working against people like Roman Torchwick and the White Fang despite only just having started at Beacon. She had lost her arm while trying to save her friend and partner and even though it had taken months for her to snap out of the depression she was in and start moving forward again, she still did it. She got back up and got moving again. It didn't even mater if the bulk of that decision was based on finding her sister and making sure she was safe.

It took balls for her to come to the camp and demand anything of her and it was clear that she was willing to fight for it if she had to. She would have taken on the whole camp if need be and she had already proven that the rank and file of the tribe were no match for her. Selfishly, she had thought that perhaps Yang had finally sought her out to get answers about why she had abandoned her and it irritated her somewhat that she was only there to try and find Summer's daughter. She had never met Ruby Rose and had only observed her from afar, but just the mere mention of her coming from Yang irritated her in the same way that she had felt irritated with the girl's mother back when they started at Beacon.

She saw perhaps a way to stick it to Ozpin by telling Yang and her friend that the Headmaster wasn't what he seemed. True to form though she really told them little, lied to them about having the bird transformation forced upon her and pretty much dumped the responsibility for any further explanation into her brother's lap. But it was her most recent actions that may have cost her the most.

So desperate to avoid Salem's wrath and foolishly thinking that they could still survive in the end, she made a deal with the enemy. She bargained her brother's life and by extension anyone who showed up at Haven with him, including her own daughter. She also knew what happened to Cinder and that besides getting the relic she wanted a piece of Ruby Rose and she knew that would without a doubt put Yang right in the Fall Maiden's sights too because she would protect her sister. Just as she had told Vernal, Yang had made her decision. Whatever happened wasn't her concern.

True to her ugly nature she had used her own daughter to help distract the rest of Cinder's group as they went down to the vault. She had even had the gall to tell the girl afterwards that she knew she would be fine, she was her daughter after all, like she had some right to make such a claim after abandoning her. And for that hubris Yang took her apart with her words, revealing the true ugliness beneath the exterior, stripping away the layers she had built over herself with years of lies told only to convince herself that everything she was doing was right.

She exposed the true Raven Branwen to the harsh, cleansing light of day. With all of her fighting ability and all of her power as the Spring Maiden, all she knew how to do was run and hide while her daughter stood before her with only one arm, scared and shaking, admitting that she didn't want to face Salem but vowing that she would in spite of all of it. That unlike her she would stand her ground just as she was standing her ground before her. When she walked by her, bumping her shoulder and essentially walking _through_ her and toward the gate to the relic, that was the moment that she truly broke.

Her daughter, who had wondered about her since learning of her existence, who wondered and worried over why she had abandoned her, was done with her. She was dismissing her not just from this confrontation, but from her life. She had been judged by her own blood as only her own blood could and the judgment was damning. She was the sole one to blame for it and no one else. She couldn't put it on someone else, she couldn't run from it. The fault was hers and no one else.

The absolute truth was that she loved her daughter, she always had. She had always hoped deep down that someday when Yang sought her out that she would stay with her and the tribe and live under the illusion of safety she had convinced herself that she had created. She knew it was pretty much an impossible dream and she would have settled for even some form of a neutral relationship where she could at least see her and talk to her now and then. Even that probably wouldn't have worked since she would have been unable to keep herself from trying to turn her against Ozpin and Qrow.

That moment when Yang brushed past her did something that she thought that nothing could ever do, it broke her heart, the pain made even worse by knowing that it was her own fault and that she had hurt Yang just by being the reprehensible person that she was. She didn't think Yang expected her to be another Summer Rose, but she would bet everything that she had that she would never have thought that her mother would turn out to be what she found.

She was stunned when she began to cry and _'I'm sorry'_ were the only words that would come from her mouth and even to her jaded soul they sounded so hollow, so weak, so useless, and so grossly inadequate. But what else could she say? What else would have meant anything at all?

 _'I'm sorry too'_ had been Yang's response. It was clear that she had held at least some small hope that she would find something good within her own mother, something that would give them even the smallest connection in some positive way and by that not being there she had hurt her daughter again. In the end she did what she was good at, she opened a portal and ran away.

She raised her head to the lightening sky and let out a tortured cry, her body shaking with sobs. Years of stress and the pain of internal conflict poured from the wound Yang had rightfully inflicted, releasing everything into the dawning day. She tried to stop it, to somehow stem the tide but it was too much and she had no hope of containing it. That moment that Yang brushed her aside, the feel of that contact and the raw emotion of it played over and over within her and it felt like an invisible hand was squeezing and crushing her heart.

The sun was almost all the way up by the time she was coherent again, but even at that the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. She didn't know how she could have any left to shed at this point. She felt so broken now and didn't know what to do. It felt as if she had awakened to a different world where nothing looked or felt the same to her. She almost smirked. What if it was a different world? Would she do anything differently from this point on? If she could go back and do it again, would she do anything differently or would she still be the same as she had been?

She couldn't answer that and it didn't matter anyway because this wasn't a different world and it wasn't the past. She had done what she had done and there was no changing it, no do overs. She felt so alone now, more alone than she had ever felt in her life. There wasn't even the deeply buried, hopeful fantasy of some kind of life or a meaningful connection with her daughter now. There was nothing.

She got to her feet, her legs feeling like pin cushions from sitting so long on the hard surface of the downed cargo ship. She regarded the half empty bottle in her right hand for a moment before bringing it to her lips and chugging down the rest. She nearly choked on it and a rivulet of the pungent liquid spilled down her chin and onto her clothes.

She tossed the empty bottle aside and it landed with a dull thud on the churned up ground. Drawing her sword she swiped at the air and created a portal. There was only one place she could think of to go now and it was probably a very bad idea. She probably wouldn't show herself in either form when she got there but she felt compelled somehow to go anyway. A glutton for punishment obviously since she knew that she most certainly would not be a welcome presence.

Changing into her bird form she flew into the portal and headed for Patch. Later she could try and pull herself back together enough to try and figure out just what she was supposed to do now and where in the hell she was supposed to go from here.

* * *

 **AN:** I think we saw just enough with Raven this season to show that she really does care about her daughter, but she's trapped by her own ideology, similar in a way to how Weiss earlier in the series was trapped by the ideology her Father forced upon her.

It will be interesting to see what Raven does now. The things she has done basically render her irredeemable, stealing from and killing helpless villagers doesn't make you a good person by any definition. But being torn down the way she was by her own daughter might serve to at least point her in a better direction. They certainly could use her power and fighting ability.

I liked that we got to see even a small glimpse of a different side of Raven I would hope that we get to see a little more. We shall see.

Since you're hanging around here why not go check out my other stories.


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